Your PC industry history is a little off.
Probably thanks to concerns about antitrust issues, IBM divvied up the PC operating system to Microsoft and the microprocessor to Intel. IBM's uncharacteristic decision to open the PC paradigm to third party developers resulted in an exploding industry of add-on hardware and software products and clones.
It had nothing to do with antitrust. The reason the IBM PC was designed as an open system is because the PC group was considered unimportant and was starved for time and resources. Boca Raton was considered a backwater and the important work was done near headquarters in New York (big iron such as AS/400 and System 390, etc.). Boca was given independence from NY because it was thought that they couldn't cause any damage to the big iron franchise.
IBM also perceived the microprocessor to be an unimportant component and Gordon Moore agreed. Intel invented the DRAM and EPROM and considered itself a memory company. I get a good laugh when I read that Grove and Moore brilliantly steered the company out of the DRAM business. Actually, they mismanaged the business that they invented on a monumental scale and were booted out by the upstart Japanese. Fortunately, Grove wrote a book detailing the disaster, which many uninformed pundits are unwilling to read. He even admits that he and Moore were the last people inside Intel to find out that they had exited the business!
IBM even bought 5% of Intel, but it had nothing to do with microprocessors. They simply wanted Americans in the DRAM business because they didn't trust the Japanese.
Intel also made a deal to give AMD perpetual second source rights for the x86 architecture. Fortunately for Intel, AMD didn't realize the value of this concession and refused to fulfill their end of the bargain by designing other chips that Intel could second source. Intel, IBM, and AMD were 3 of the largest chip companies and none of them realized the tremendous potential of the PC.
While IBM was the catalyst creating Wintel, everything about the model, the openness, the separation of hardware and software, everything, was anathema to IBM. IBM tried to choke off this insanity and take back control with the introduction of a proprietary Micro-Channel Architecture (MCA) Bus and OS/2. The budding clone industry rebuffed IBM on the MCA Bus, and Microsoft eventually quit the OS/2 effort, taking with them their Windows marbles and market penetration.
Bill Gates wrote a book that was almost as illuminating as Grove's book. He admitted that he offered IBM 25% of the company. Similar to the Intel-AMD deal and IBM's Intel investment, even the principals involved lacked foresight of the significance of the offer, so IBM turned Microsoft down. Gates even tried to convince Apple to port their OS to the x86, so MS could extend their word processor and spreadsheet monopolies from the Mac to the PC and challenge WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Apple was just as clueless as IBM and Gates!
The Microsoft and Intel empires were accidental. Wind River will never be another Microsoft. Even Microsoft will never be another Microsoft. They'll each fight for their share of the embedded market and no single company will dominate.
The market cap of Microsoft ($241b) is higher than Intel ($142b) and Lucent ($94b) combined. Someday, the stock market and the trustbusters will realize the company that made every major chip advance (integrated circuit, DRAM, microprocessor, ROM, EPROM, flash memory) and the company that invented long distance communication and the transistor are each more valuable than a company that develops buggy software. |
